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Why a Thick Bike?
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- What is custom?
- What makes a bike Thick?
- Who should buy one?
- Why are they so damn expensive?
No two are exactly alike. All bikes that you can see on this website were made for an individual rider to their specifications. It seems that the bulk of this site leads people to believe that Thick has a factory somwhere that spits out frames of our design. This is not the case. I make each frame by hand in my shop on the South Side of Pittsburgh, PA. I have no employees. Each frame requires careful drawings and lots of thought. Each tube is painstakingly hand cut, shaped and fit.
Each dropout is designed for the bike it will be on. Material thickness can range from 3/16" to 3/8". Then it is hacked out of 4130 plate, ground down, sanded, smoothed and matched to its mate. Any capped tube in a non-structural location, like the down tube, gets special finishing so that the welds disappear. This gives the illusion that the tube is actually a solid bar. These examples of frame building techniques give you an idea of how much time must be spent on each and every frame. This time is what makes Thick frames more expensive. A handbuilt production frame made by a larger company takes less than an hour to create from start to finish.
It takes me at least that long to make a working drawing. For example, A larger manufacturer that I know of can turn out a frame in about 55 minutes.
So, if you do not need a unique bike or custom features not found on other bikes. You should probably buy a production bike. If you do not know exactly what you want, then you should probably buy a production bike. These days there are plenty of good bikes out there.
But, if you want a special size or configuration, if you want to recreate a bike no longer in production maybe a Thick is for you. Sometimes a customer will come to me and say, "I like this type of frame that I have but it keeps breaking here, and I would prefer the brakes to be here, and the top tube could be a quarter inch longer." I say to them "no problem."
All Thick bikes are made to be ridden and ridden hard. As such they are not the lightest bikes. Of course you can tell this from the photos. They are not extremely heavy either.
Most tubing used is 0.035" wall thickness. However, you may specify 0.049" or thicker if you deem it necessary. Gussets added to the top tube and down tube help reinforce the head tube area without adding much weight. I will be happy to work with you on a frame design.
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